Where Titanic Meets Carnage and Insanity - Dead Silence Review!
I am not exactly sure what the book equivalent is to a good popcorn flick, but that’s what S. A. Barnes has given us in her new book Dead Silence. As the book went on, especially in the last third, I found myself increasingly unable to put it down. I lost sleep on this one. That’s how I know this one was good. I love my sleep, folks.
S. A. Barnes, who fans of young adult novels may better know as Stacey Kade, brings us the story of Claire Kovalic. Claire is Team Leader (TL) on a spacecraft doing routine maintenance on the communications grid for their parent company. Out in the deep of space, they pick up a distress signal. Unsure who it might be from (they're supposed to be alone out there) and unable to communicate with the troubled ship, they decide to check it out. They stumble across a luxury liner called the Aurora. But here’s the rub: the Aurora has been lost for 20 years. Two decades ago, the Aurora was gilded and decked out for all the wealthiest people on Earth to take a one year tour of the solar system. However, one day, it just went missing. No one could find it. No one could even find debris or traces of where it had been. No one ever heard from it again and everyone assumed it was lost forever.
When Claire and her team enter the Aurora, they are met with a ship dead in space. No environmentals, no power, no sign of survivors. What they also find is a ship filled with the gruesomely murdered bodies of every passenger and crew member. They find strange messages written on the walls in blood. The captain’s log has been erased and there is no sign that anything went wrong with the ship. How did this happen? What went wrong? How did the Aurora go missing? What should they do about their epic find?
While trying to figure this mystery out, Claire’s crew start to see things. Dead passengers, dead family members who were never on the Aurora, and oddly even some that are still alive back home. Are they real? Are their minds beginning to unravel? Is whatever happened to the crew and passengers of the Aurora beginning to happen to them?
The jacket on the book claims this is “Titanic meets The Shining”. That’s an apt comparison in a lot of ways. This is definitely a sort of haunted house tale. You see the characters going into a big structure they can’t easily remove themselves from. You see a few small bad things start to happen. Then you see more and more. And you know - more or less - where this is going. Like all good haunted house tales, this is just as much a mystery as it is a fright fest.
However, there’s clearly a few other sources Barnes is borrowing from as well. There are definitely strong hints of the Alien series here. Claire is a woman of authority, but her crew doesn’t follow her direction several times when they should have. Like Ripley in Aliens and Alien 3, Claire is clearly very damaged by her experiences. That damage both makes her stronger and weaker when facing the ghosts. There is also a corporation which you strongly suspect is up to no good, but you’re not quite sure how. I don’t want to give spoilers, but you see even more in the last third. Barnes also seems to be borrowing heavily from Event Horizon. The scenes of carnage and insanity Claire’s team find when entering the Aurora, but also their ensuing experiences are highly reminiscent.
These borrowings, rather than being eye rolling, all seem to work for Dead Silence. I found myself longing to know what happened on the Aurora. I shushed my family as Claire’s team started to experience one weird unsettling thing after another. I found myself wondering how long before I could get back to the book when I was at my kid’s gymnastics meet. And I needed to know how the corporation fit into the puzzle. Good stuff!
When I say this one is the book version of a good popcorn film, I mean it. It was fun, from start to finish. Yeah, you’ve probably seen all these tropes and archetypes before. There’s no new ground being broken. That said, nothing here feels old or tired. Barnes pulls off the trick of keeping everything fun and engaging. I plowed right through this one. And if sci-fi horror is your bag as well, I think you will have fun with this one.
